Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

THE CLassicaL PrRrop

inexhaustible domain of classical archeology that the statement that our knowledge must always be incomplete holds good.

I. The Classical Period 1. Epic Poetry

We begin our summary with mythical prehistoric times and start with the well-known remark of Cicero (Brutus, 18, 71), that there were already poets before Homer. This is undoubtedly correct, and indications that it is so are found in the Homeric poems themselves. But of all these poems nothing has been preserved ; their creators were the pioneers who paved the way for Homer, modulated the language and created epic verse, the long line of the hexameter ; their works fell into the shadows of oblivion when the sun of Homeric poesy rose in the literary sky. Nevertheless, much information has come down to us from this period, and the history of Greek literature informs us of an imposing number of poets who lived before Homer, although, to be sure, most of them are names merely—inventions of a later time to facilitate the connection of the oldest poetical creations with the more plastic conception of definite poets.

One of the earliest of these mythical poets was Pamphos, of whom Pausanias (ix, 27, 2) tells us that he wrote poems on Eros. This remark is valuable for us, since it shows that the Greeks already in the oldest times of their literary history assume the worship of Eros, and so we can with perfect right affirm that Eros stands at the beginning of Hellenic civilization, although certainly in the Homeric poems the god Eros does not happen to be mentioned by name. But in the 7 heogony of Hesiod (Theogony, 120) Eros is constantly mentioned among the oldest gods, that is, among those existing from the earliest times.

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